Advanced Visual Computing for Image Saliency Detection

Saliency detection is a category of computer vision algorithms that aims to filter out the most salient object in a given image. Existing saliency detection methods can generally be categorized as bottom-up methods and top-down methods, and the prevalent deep neural network (DNN) has begun to show its applications in saliency detection in recent years. However, the challenges in existing methods, such as problematic pre-assumption, inefficient feature integration and absence of high-level feature learning, prevent them from superior performances. In this thesis, to address the limitations above, we have proposed multiple novel models with favorable performances. Specifically, we first systematically reviewed the developments of saliency detection and its related works, and then proposed four new methods, with two based on low-level image features, and two based on DNNs. The regularized random walks ranking method (RR) and its reversion-correction-improved version (RCRR) are based on conventional low-level image features, which exhibit higher accuracy and robustness in extracting the image boundary based foreground / background queries; while the background search and foreground estimation (BSFE) and dense and sparse labeling (DSL) methods are based on DNNs, which have shown their dominant advantages in high-level image feature extraction, as well as the combined strength of multi-dimensional features. Each of the proposed methods is evaluated by extensive experiments, and all of them behave favorably against the state-of-the-art, especially the DSL method, which achieves remarkably higher performance against sixteen state-of-the-art methods (including ten conventional methods and six learning based methods) on six well-recognized public datasets. The successes of our proposed methods reveal more potential and meaningful applications of saliency detection in real-life computer vision tasks

Robust saliency detection via regularized random walks ranking

In the field of saliency detection, many graph-based algorithms heavily depend on the accuracy of the pre-processed superpixel segmentation, which leads to significant sacrifice of detail information from the input image. In this paper, we propose a novel bottom-up saliency detection approach that takes advantage of both region-based features and image details. To provide more accurate saliency estimations, we first optimize the image boundary selection by the proposed erroneous boundary removal. By taking the image details and region-based estimations into account, we then propose the regularized random walks ranking to formulate pixel-wised saliency maps from the superpixel-based background and foreground saliency estimations. Experiment results on two public datasets indicate the significantly improved accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm in comparison with 12 state-of-the-art saliency detection approaches

A graph-based mathematical morphology reader

This survey paper aims at providing a "literary" anthology of mathematical morphology on graphs. It describes in the English language many ideas stemming from a large number of different papers, hence providing a unified view of an active and diverse field of research

3D time series analysis of cell shape using Laplacian approaches

Background: Fundamental cellular processes such as cell movement, division or food uptake critically depend on cells being able to change shape. Fast acquisition of three-dimensional image time series has now become possible, but we lack efficient tools for analysing shape deformations in order to understand the real three-dimensional nature of shape changes. Results: We present a framework for 3D+time cell shape analysis. The main contribution is three-fold: First, we develop a fast, automatic random walker method for cell segmentation. Second, a novel topology fixing method is proposed to fix segmented binary volumes without spherical topology. Third, we show that algorithms used for each individual step of the analysis pipeline (cell segmentation, topology fixing, spherical parameterization, and shape representation) are closely related to the Laplacian operator. The framework is applied to the shape analysis of neutrophil cells. Conclusions: The method we propose for cell segmentation is faster than the traditional random walker method or the level set method, and performs better on 3D time-series of neutrophil cells, which are comparatively noisy as stacks have to be acquired fast enough to account for cell motion. Our method for topology fixing outperforms the tools provided by SPHARM-MAT and SPHARM-PDM in terms of their successful fixing rates. The different tasks in the presented pipeline for 3D+time shape analysis of cells can be solved using Laplacian approaches, opening the possibility of eventually combining individual steps in order to speed up computations

Deep Networks Based Energy Models for Object Recognition from Multimodality Images

Object recognition has been extensively investigated in computer vision area, since it is a fundamental and essential technique in many important applications, such as robotics, auto-driving, automated manufacturing, and security surveillance. According to the selection criteria, object recognition mechanisms can be broadly categorized into object proposal and classification, eye fixation prediction and saliency object detection. Object proposal tends to capture all potential objects from natural images, and then classify them into predefined groups for image description and interpretation. For a given natural image, human perception is normally attracted to the most visually important regions/objects. Therefore, eye fixation prediction attempts to localize some interesting points or small regions according to human visual system (HVS). Based on these interesting points and small regions, saliency object detection algorithms propagate the important extracted information to achieve a refined segmentation of the whole salient objects. In addition to natural images, object recognition also plays a critical role in clinical practice. The informative insights of anatomy and function of human body obtained from multimodality biomedical images such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), transrectal ultrasound (TRUS), computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) facilitate the precision medicine. Automated object recognition from biomedical images empowers the non-invasive diagnosis and treatments via automated tissue segmentation, tumor detection and cancer staging. The conventional recognition methods normally utilize handcrafted features (such as oriented gradients, curvature, Haar features, Haralick texture features, Laws energy features, etc.) depending on the image modalities and object characteristics. It is challenging to have a general model for object recognition. Superior to handcrafted features, deep neural networks (DNN) can extract self-adaptive features corresponding with specific task, hence can be employed for general object recognition models. These DNN-features are adjusted semantically and cognitively by over tens of millions parameters corresponding to the mechanism of human brain, therefore leads to more accurate and robust results. Motivated by it, in this thesis, we proposed DNN-based energy models to recognize object on multimodality images. For the aim of object recognition, the major contributions of this thesis can be summarized below: 1. We firstly proposed a new comprehensive autoencoder model to recognize the position and shape of prostate from magnetic resonance images. Different from the most autoencoder-based methods, we focused on positive samples to train the model in which the extracted features all come from prostate. After that, an image energy minimization scheme was applied to further improve the recognition accuracy. The proposed model was compared with three classic classifiers (i.e. support vector machine with radial basis function kernel, random forest, and naive Bayes), and demonstrated significant superiority for prostate recognition on magnetic resonance images. We further extended the proposed autoencoder model for saliency object detection on natural images, and the experimental validation proved the accurate and robust saliency object detection results of our model. 2. A general multi-contexts combined deep neural networks (MCDN) model was then proposed for object recognition from natural images and biomedical images. Under one uniform framework, our model was performed in multi-scale manner. Our model was applied for saliency object detection from natural images as well as prostate recognition from magnetic resonance images. Our experimental validation demonstrated that the proposed model was competitive to current state-of-the-art methods. 3. We designed a novel saliency image energy to finely segment salient objects on basis of our MCDN model. The region priors were taken into account in the energy function to avoid trivial errors. Our method outperformed state-of-the-art algorithms on five benchmarking datasets. In the experiments, we also demonstrated that our proposed saliency image energy can boost the results of other conventional saliency detection methods

강인한 대화형 영상 분할 알고리즘을 위한 시드 정보 확장 기법에 대한 연구

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2021. 2. 이경무.Segmentation of an area corresponding to a desired object in an image is essential to computer vision problems. This is because most algorithms are performed in semantic units when interpreting or analyzing images. However, segmenting the desired object from a given image is an ambiguous issue. The target object varies depending on user and purpose. To solve this problem, an interactive segmentation technique has been proposed. In this approach, segmentation was performed in the desired direction according to interaction with the user. In this case, seed information provided by the user plays an important role. If the seed provided by a user contain abundant information, the accuracy of segmentation increases. However, providing rich seed information places much burden on the users. Therefore, the main goal of the present study was to obtain satisfactory segmentation results using simple seed information. We primarily focused on converting the provided sparse seed information to a rich state so that accurate segmentation results can be derived. To this end, a minimum user input was taken and enriched it through various seed enrichment techniques. A total of three interactive segmentation techniques was proposed based on: (1) Seed Expansion, (2) Seed Generation, (3) Seed Attention. Our seed enriching type comprised expansion of area around a seed, generation of new seed in a new position, and attention to semantic information. First, in seed expansion, we expanded the scope of the seed. We integrated reliable pixels around the initial seed into the seed set through an expansion step composed of two stages. Through the extended seed covering a wider area than the initial seed, the seed's scarcity and imbalance problems was resolved. Next, in seed generation, we created a seed at a new point, but not around the seed. We trained the system by imitating the user behavior through providing a new seed point in the erroneous region. By learning the user's intention, our model could e ciently create a new seed point. The generated seed helped segmentation and could be used as additional information for weakly supervised learning. Finally, through seed attention, we put semantic information in the seed. Unlike the previous models, we integrated both the segmentation process and seed enrichment process. We reinforced the seed information by adding semantic information to the seed instead of spatial expansion. The seed information was enriched through mutual attention with feature maps generated during the segmentation process. The proposed models show superiority compared to the existing techniques through various experiments. To note, even with sparse seed information, our proposed seed enrichment technique gave by far more accurate segmentation results than the other existing methods.영상에서 원하는 물체 영역을 잘라내는 것은 컴퓨터 비전 문제에서 필수적인 요소이다. 영상을 해석하거나 분석할 때, 대부분의 알고리즘들이 의미론적인 단위 기반으로 동작하기 때문이다. 그러나 영상에서 물체 영역을 분할하는 것은 모호한 문제이다. 사용자와 목적에 따라 원하는 물체 영역이 달라지기 때문이다. 이를 해결하기 위해 사용자와의 교류를 통해 원하는 방향으로 영상 분할을 진행하는 대화형 영상 분할 기법이 사용된다. 여기서 사용자가 제공하는 시드 정보가 중요한 역할을 한다. 사용자의 의도를 담고 있는 시드 정보가 정확할수록 영상 분할의 정확도도 증가하게 된다. 그러나 풍부한 시드 정보를 제공하는 것은 사용자에게 많은 부담을 주게 된다. 그러므로 간단한 시드 정보를 사용하여 만족할만한 분할 결과를 얻는 것이 주요 목적이 된다. 우리는 제공된 희소한 시드 정보를 변환하는 작업에 초점을 두었다. 만약 시드 정보가 풍부하게 변환된다면 정확한 영상 분할 결과를 얻을 수 있기 때문이다. 그러므로 본 학위 논문에서는 시드 정보를 풍부하게 하는 기법들을 제안한다. 최소한의 사용자 입력을 가정하고 이를 다양한 시드 확장 기법을 통해 변환한다. 우리는 시드 확대, 시드 생성, 시드 주의 집중에 기반한 총 세 가지의 대화형 영상 분할 기법을 제안한다. 각각 시드 주변으로의 영역 확대, 새로운 지점에 시드 생성, 의미론적 정보에 주목하는 형태의 시드 확장 기법을 사용한다. 먼저 시드 확대에 기반한 기법에서 우리는 시드의 영역 확장을 목표로 한다. 두 단계로 구성된 확대 과정을 통해 처음 시드 주변의 비슷한 픽셀들을 시드 영역으로 편입한다. 이렇게 확장된 시드를 사용함으로써 시드의 희소함과 불균형으로 인한 문제를 해결할 수 있다. 다음으로 시드 생성에 기반한 기법에서 우리는 시드 주변이 아닌 새로운 지점에 시드를 생성한다. 우리는 오차가 발생한 영역에 사용자가 새로운 시드를 제공하는 동작을 모방하여 시스템을 학습하였다. 사용자의 의도를 학습함으로써 효과적으로 시드를 생성할 수 있다. 생성된 시드는 영상 분할의 정확도를 높일 뿐만 아니라 약지도학습을 위한 데이터로써 활용될 수 있다. 마지막으로 시드 주의 집중을 활용한 기법에서 우리는 의미론적 정보를 시드에 담는다. 기존에 제안한 기법들과 달리 영상 분할 동작과 시드 확장 동작이 통합된 모델을 제안한다. 시드 정보는 영상 분할 네트워크의 특징맵과 상호 교류하며 그 정보가 풍부해진다. 제안한 모델들은 다양한 실험을 통해 기존 기법 대비 우수한 성능을 기록하였다. 특히 시드가 부족한 상황에서 시드 확장 기법들은 훌륭한 대화형 영상 분할 성능을 보였다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Previous Works 2 1.2 Proposed Methods 4 2 Interactive Segmentation with Seed Expansion 9 2.1 Introduction 9 2.2 Proposed Method 12 2.2.1 Background 13 2.2.2 Pyramidal RWR 16 2.2.3 Seed Expansion 19 2.2.4 Re nement with Global Information 24 2.3 Experiments 27 2.3.1 Dataset 27 2.3.2 Implement Details 28 2.3.3 Performance 29 2.3.4 Contribution of Each Part 30 2.3.5 Seed Consistency 31 2.3.6 Running Time 33 2.4 Summary 34 3 Interactive Segmentation with Seed Generation 37 3.1 Introduction 37 3.2 Related Works 40 3.3 Proposed Method 41 3.3.1 System Overview 41 3.3.2 Markov Decision Process 42 3.3.3 Deep Q-Network 46 3.3.4 Model Architecture 47 3.4 Experiments 48 3.4.1 Implement Details 48 3.4.2 Performance 49 3.4.3 Ablation Study 53 3.4.4 Other Datasets 55 3.5 Summary 58 4 Interactive Segmentation with Seed Attention 61 4.1 Introduction 61 4.2 Related Works 64 4.3 Proposed Method 65 4.3.1 Interactive Segmentation Network 65 4.3.2 Bi-directional Seed Attention Module 67 4.4 Experiments 70 4.4.1 Datasets 70 4.4.2 Metrics 70 4.4.3 Implement Details 71 4.4.4 Performance 71 4.4.5 Ablation Study 76 4.4.6 Seed enrichment methods 79 4.5 Summary 82 5 Conclusions 87 5.1 Summary 89 Bibliography 90 국문초록 103Docto